The most recent development on the federal policy front is that the administration has called for a “cap on assessment” so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. Officials are working on reauthorizing federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. Congress is being called on to “reduce over-testing.”

Reduce over-testing sounds like turning down the volume or lowering the thermostat in the house. As if it were one gesture.

Twenty years of pushing a massive boulder uphill, in the name of improving American children’s math skills (“scores”), in order to compete with countries like Singapore (#1), Netherlands (#9), and Canada (#13), and science, to at least be on par with countries like Hong Kong (#1), Japan (#3)…Finland (#4).

The U.S. ranks #24 and #25. Does this keep you up at night? Me neither.

Education has become a needless Sisyphean task. And the results of this sweat equity is not one nudge on competitive test scores. Because learning is not a competition.

No Child Left Behind. Has there ever been such a bitterly ironic name for anything?

Parents, teachers and unions have shared their voices. They may be protesting, but they are not pro-testing. They are against teaching to tests, against spending all their class time preparing kids to take tests, managing test anxiety, bypassing student interests, natural inquiry, discovery and social emotional learning in favor of pushing the boulder up the hill.

What is so disturbing to us as educators, parents, caregivers and people who work hard to keep the light on in our children…is that our nation’s children have been suffering the fallout of programs that don’t support their developing brains, nervous systems, health, or emotional and psychological wellbeing.

When you tell children they will be tested and timed, their creative brain shuts off, the part of their brain involved in higher thinking, goes dark.
When children are not engaged in what they’re learning, they don’t remember it.
When children are not able to follow their curiosity in the classroom, they get restless.
When they are restless, they move around, talk, can’t focus or stay attentive.
When kids can’t focus and stay attentive, we think they have an attention problem.
When kids lose attention, they are pressured to get with the program and warned they’ll fail.
When they are pressured and warned they’ll fail, they get stressed or they get depressed.
When children are stressed, their amygdala fires up, their flight, flight, freeze responses kick in. Cortisol increases. They go into survival mode. Not learning mode.
We don’t know every child’s story.
We can’t teach a child who is hungry. Or numb with pain.
When children are stressed due to trauma, their memory center hippocampus shrinks.
When kids, especially from just before middle school and then throughout adolescence to age 24, are chronically stressed, depressed, and lack sleep due to excessive homework, testing anxiety, parental stress and pressure to keep up, compounded by social conflicts, low self-worth, bullying, and feelings of isolation, they are more at risk of turning to substances and other means, for escape, acceptance or numbing, and often feel trapped in circumstances they cannot alter.
When kids feel despondent, they are more prone to addiction, and can make impulsive decisions that can be fatal.
When kids don’t sleep at least 8 hours a night, their bodies begin re-writing genes.
When teens and adults get less then 7 hours a night for 7 days, it changes up to 700 genes.
When genes change, disease markers can be switched on either in childhood or adolescence.
When adolescents are chronically stressed out, their brains excessively prune away brain cells and dendrites, leaving them at risk for mental illness. Because the teen brain is undergoing a massive overhaul, most mental illness reveals itself in adolescence for this reason.

Millions of American students drop out. Those who don’t…don’t always thrive. There is a term for kids who get to college already burned out: crispies. We may not be #1 in math and science, but we are #1 in the world in many alarming areas like ritalin consumption in children, prescriptions of anti-anxiety medication for college students, prescriptions of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotics among adolescents, diagnoses and medication of ADHD and ADD, mental illness, obesity, addiction, crime and incarceration.

In some states, jail cells are built based on literacy rates of elementary school students.
Imagine. Instead of officials allocating resources for, making time, space and place for teachers to be with students and find out what’s not working for them with reading, possibly dyslexia or vision processing or no books at home or nobody at home, we are instructed to send reading scores to people who only envision a cell with bars, not broken-hearted kids with dreams.

Teachers are not paid to be healers. But, the good ones, the ones who love teaching and love their kids, the ones who make such a positive impact on kids that they never forget them, those teachers and students (and parents) know in their gut that good teaching is healing.

And let us not, for a moment, think these programs have not deeply affected teachers.
Over-testing requires preparation time, focus on teaching what’s on the test since it’s unfathomably tied to teachers’ jobs and school budgets.
Over-testing places the focus on testing, not teaching; scoring, not learning; managing, not engaging; and apathy, not curiosity.
Over-testing eclipsed a teacher’s creativity to come up with new ideas, to elicit innovate thinking from students, to encourage their questions, to spark discussion that goes a little longer than expected because everyone go into it and took it somewhere beyond a rubric, beyond a lesson plan that must feed into a test which then measures a child’s comprehension which determines a teacher’s ability to teach which influences her job status and ultimately the school’s eligibility for funding. Teachers, under duress and stress, lose their spark, too. Teachers must feel engaged, valued, respected, too.

There is enough science now, a mountain of evidence, that shows us how children learn best, how important a healthy brain is to a child’s development, how necessary it is to create an environment and educational culture that integrates learning with curiosity, wonder, play, movement, arts, music, social and emotional connection, engagement, innovation, empathy and compassion. When we exclude or cut any of these from our education “approach,” we don’t just lower scores, we create a systemic decline. A decline in the health and wellbeing of our kids. We aren’t scoring well there, either.

In fact, the United States ranks #26 on the United Nations global report on children’s wellbeing. How many countries were ranked in the report? 29. We are 26th out of 29 in children’s overall wellbeing. That includes education.

Just like a body that thrives when it is cared for with healthy food, exercise, sleep, creativity and novelty, love and connection. And then breaks down and gets sick when we lack sleep. When we over-eat. When we are sedentary. When we narrow our world and stop learning. When we are lonely, isolated, hurt and neglected.

We are neurobiologically designed for learning. That’s how we grow, and scientists are now discovering it’s the key to neurogenesis–the brain’s ability to grow new neurons.

Here’s an acronym for us to ponder: R.E.S.T.
Resilience, engagement, social connection and trust.
We all need it. Our kids need it immediately and without delay.

We must give our unhealthy system REST.

It’s not too late to restore children’s love of learning and teachers’ love of teaching.
We must all educate ourselves about what children and teachers need, and pursue it, not as an ideal, but as an inalienable human right.